


smudged watercolour

by TrulyCertain



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Early in Canon, Gen, Identity Porn, no-one accuses superman of this shit, oh crikey I'm writing my childhood, this is deeply odd
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2019-07-14
Packaged: 2020-06-28 03:55:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19804210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrulyCertain/pseuds/TrulyCertain
Summary: Jim grabs the second while he has it. "I've just got one question. There a reason you're not looking into the Wayne case?"(Prompt: "being accused of your own murder.")





	smudged watercolour

It's Gotham. The nights are always dark. Yet somehow, this one seems worse. Maybe because he got complacent and figured it'd never come. God _damn_ it.  
  
There's a brief, almost-inaudible inhale - the second before Batman becomes just another shadow and Jim turns around to nothing.   
  
Jim grabs the second while he has it. "I've just got one question. There a reason you're not looking into the Wayne case?"  
  
"Should I be? I'm keeping an eye on it." That rough voice, like a sack dragged across gravel. The guy does something to it, something to stop anyone listening too closely. Digital scrambling, probably. Occasionally, when he gets angry or, just sometimes, sarcastic, something in it's almost recognizable - then it's gone again, under the processing. The edge of a realization, never allowed to come into focus. Drives Jim crazy.  
  
Jim takes a drag of his cigar and tries to seem casual. He knows he's failing. "Missing persons, that's usually something you're good at. Your kind of thing. You helped us find the Dennet kid in under twelve hours."  
  
"Wayne's a billionaire, Jim. Half the GCPD will be looking. There are probably already fifty PIs on the case. Well-paid ones." And there's something like thinly-veiled contempt under the bass growl. Interesting. Batman takes a couple steps forward and looks over the edge of the roof, at the streetlights and neon trying vainly to hold back the dark. From up here, the folks walking home too late and the shopfronts are just smudges, watercolour running in the rain. "There are people down there who need us."  
  
"Yeah." Jim lets the hardness creep into his voice. "But you're here having a nice little evening talk on a rooftop. Not with them. So maybe you've got time. You really don't suspect foul play?"  
  
Batman shakes his head, once. "He's too public. They'd have to be an idiot."  
  
"I don't know..." Jim exhales blue smoke, and watches Batman turn his face back to the city, mouth set tight and disapproving even as he tries to hide it. ( _Bad for your health,_ he said once, and didn't seem amused when Jim made a crack about Gotham cops not having the longest life expectancy anyhow.) Jim says, "A lot of people were pretty angry, after the latest scandal. Looks like he's being paid off. And after that community project went to shit..."  
  
"He isn't." Short, sharp, certain. Not just the regular charming curtness, either. Belatedly: "The paper trail doesn't add up. I looked into it."   
  
There's a tension building in that stubbled jaw, under the mask. It matches the tension starting in Jim's head. (Has to be twelve o' clock shadow by now. How does a vigilante even find time to shave? Not that it matters. Does some teacher or construction worker or checkout guy get back home and wash the blood off and put on pyjamas and then go and do it all again the next night? No, the tech would take too much money for that. Something squirrelled away? Stolen? Some Wayne Enterprises employee? Is some man walking past him on the street chock-full of holes and bandages and storing a pair of pointy ears at home? Why the hell doesn't Jim _know?_ )  
  
Jim hammers the nail into his coffin. " _You_ were pretty angry."  
  
Batman goes very, very still. That kind of coiled tightness before a fight. Big guy, dangerous as hell - and suddenly Jim remembers that all too clearly. (That first night. Running into a _thing_ made of menace and shadow that resolved itself into a man, eventually. A man who somehow got him out of a routine patrol that turned into a gunfight. Thinking afterward, _Thank God he's on our side._ ) For a while it wasn't something he had to think about, but now...

Batman turns his head, just slightly. Listening. Waiting.  
  
Jim goes back to his cigar, and sighs. "I get it, someone has to be pretty damn angry to do what you do. Someone hurt you, or someone you love, badly. We all got stories. But lately... That last perp you dragged in? Looked like a tire iron would've been kinder."  
  
_The fractures will heal._ Said all matter-of-fact from a shadowed corner, like that made it less brutal, like those injuries wouldn't need months of physio. Like anyone on the force doing that wouldn't have had to fill in three feet of paperwork and go up in a courthouse to avoid being fired, at _best_. Jim would've kicked them out himself.  
  
Batman growls, flat, "There's a line. I don't cross it."   
  
Jim has the feeling that's more than anyone else would've gotten. Anyone else, and whoever's under the mask would've just left without dignifying that with an answer. He's seen enough of Batman's disappearing acts. "That's what I tell everyone else, when they ask me why the _hell_ I'm letting some caped kook take over our crime scenes. I've always believed it, but... What the hell happened to you?"  
  
Silence. Sharp, and so heavy it presses down on Jim's skin. He's pretty sure Batman's spent years practising to get ones like it just right.  
  
He sighs, and wonders why he didn't expect anything else. "Took me a while to figure out, but... I know you expected better of him." He takes a drag from his cigar.  
  
Batman stares out over the city, tense. The words are as tight as the rest of him. "Rich men in Gotham don't come good. It's one or the other. You know that."  
  
"Yeah, except... I think you hoped. Does a man like you do hope? Maybe you wear too much black for that. Feels like in Gotham, you forget how to, but there's gotta be a reason you started this whole thing." He steps forward, carefully, until he's standing next to a sorta-friend he's known for years and never known at all. "You've always seemed like you do this for a reason. Not just revenge. I've seen you with kids." Batman looks away at that, jaw working, like he's ashamed of compassion, and Jim continues relentlessly, "I've seen you with little old ladies and _abuelas._ I've seen you with dogs people left chained up too long. You're beating yourself to a pulp against the thugs of Gotham for a reason. Knew from the first time I met you you wanted to help." He flicks ash off the roof. "You want this city to be better. And you thought for a while that maybe Wayne did too. That maybe he could change something. We all did. Jesus, it's like Dent all over again."  
  
There's something tired, resigned in Batman's stillness now. The glance away, the set of the shoulders... Jim knows that he's being allowed to see these things. That it's some kind of trust, or the closest Batman gets.  
  
Jim says, "I guess it was just... one setback too many, for someone. I almost wouldn't blame them. This city, it grinds you down." He exhales, and watches the smoke drift across smudges of light, the moving traffic. "Slowly. Tenderizes you so it can eat you from the inside. And the worst thing? It's so slow you don't even notice, until one day you can't get out of bed in the morning because there's no damn _point._ " He exhales. "I almost wouldn't blame them," he repeats, soft.  
  
The silence stretches, grows colder.  
  
"Are you accusing me of something, Commissioner?" It's quiet and expressionless, and dangerous.  
  
Jim swallows. "I'm saying, give me a reason not to."  
  
Batman looks at him now. Under the greasepaint, Jim sees wide dark eyes, frustrated or... pleading. It's not obvious in this light, but they're blue. He realized that at some point near the start, when he was still gathering pieces for if he had to give a description of some armoured bat-eared psycho. When he'd started to figure out there was a human in there, somewhere under the growl and jackboots. "I can't," Batman says, and there's a fray to the flat growl, something like desperation. "Not yet."  
  
Realization steals up Jim's spine. "You know where he is."  
  
"I might. And there will be a good reason he's in hiding. Men like him are cowards, and Falcone - "  
  
" _Batman._ "  
  
"A week." The growl isn't all the processing now. His voice is harsh, furious. "Give me a week, and you'll have Wayne." He adds, quieter now, "There's a line."  
  
"Bat - "  
  
The hiss and click of a grapple. Somehow Batman steps back and then is... gone.  
  
Jim's left standing with what's left of his cigar, feeling suddenly somehow like he's failed a test. One he didn't even know had been set. He stubs it out, breathes Gotham in, and mutters, "Well, shit."


End file.
